Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Details: There aren't enough good Aquazone layouts out there. Here's a small base for loading a decent-sized Aquanaut sub (and a few smaller subs). The ship has some non-LEGO supports to hold it up, but considering how hard it would be to truly recapture the feel of the Aquashark set 6190 Shark's Crystal Cave in an Aquanaut-themed model, I think it's fine. Besides, submarines don't generally land on the ocean floor, so a higher loading area that requires the submarine to hover above the ocean floor is more realistic. Any submarine that can carry this size of Aquanaut army is clearly doing things right.

For those of you with no idea what I'm talking about, Aquazone was a LEGO theme introduced in 1995 and phased out around 1999. It was loosely revived more recently as "Aqua Raiders", which is even more confusing since "Aquaraiders" was also the name of the drill-happy faction released in 1997. The original two factions were Aquanauts and Aquasharks. Sadly, the short life of the Aquazone series is now seen as the beginning of the "playthemes" phenomenon, where LEGO is increasingly releasing short-lived lines with original characters and simple plot lines (like good guys vs bad guys in fantasy wars - you'll notice very similar plots in Power Miners, Agents, the current Pirates line, Exo-Force, Mars Mission, Life On Mars, etc.). Now it's a bit easier to see the writing on the wall where discontinued themes go - pretty much anything that LEGO's "playthemes" department works on isn't bound to stick around.

...of course, that will never stop us from reviving our favorites for original creations - which is why models like this one are so exciting in the first place. These models revive something special that was clearly only meant for a few years that have since passed.

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